For example, a scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey takes place on the moon. No, they didn't film it on the moon, silly! They filmed it on Earth; it's just that nobody told Kubrick that. He insisted that all of the equipment on screen be built to actually work on the actual moon anyway.

Likewise, the B-52 bomber he constructed as a set for Dr. Strangelove was described by some U.S. Air Force personnel as "absolutely correct," which worried them a bit, since the B-52 was still totally classified at that point.

"The bombs actually will not work without a cowboy."

But possibly the strangest and most unnecessary detail Kubrick ever insisted upon was the war room in Dr. Strangelove. While the set was being constructed, he decided (on what we'll call a Kubrickian whim) that the top of the table should be covered in green baize. "It should be like a poker table," he said, "there's the President, the generals and the Russian Ambassador playing a game of poker for the fate of the world."

Which would be totally reasonable and merely representative of his keen eye for detail and metaphor ... if the film weren't shot entirely in black and white.

But Neo, like every man, was predestined to fail this one: They're wandering through some kind of business district, and every pedestrian is in a boring, drab suit, save for that pretty girl. Of course he's going to focus on her and notice the agent. We, the audience, only passed the test because we were once removed, and could view the scene objectively.

Except we didn't pass, either. Not at all. Because we didn't notice that every person in that scene is a doppelganger:

A frumpy doppelganger.

We could write that off as repeating an extra for a different shot, if it weren't for this ...

Two blonde women on either side of Neo, two sailors in the back.

The truly crazy part is that this wasn't CGI: the Wachowski's spent two whole days in Sydney trying to hunt down and cast real identical twins just for this scene. The idea was to show the viewer that Mouse, who created the code, was a lazy programmer and copy/pasted a bunch of characters instead of designing unique people. But really, since basically nobody in the audience noticed the clone armies either, it just proved that God could've gotten away with a whole lot less work by simply palette-swapping humanity. Turns out we would've been mostly cool with it, so long as there were hot girls in red dresses strutting about.

#2. Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters may be the perfect genre comedy. A ludicrous premise, great comedic actors and lots of improv -- those were the cornerstones of this classic. Except there are three things missing from that list: Research, realism and detail.

Why, in the book A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts and Ghostbusters, written by Peter Aykroyd, you can learn about the history of the methods that the Ghostbusters use in the film, and keen eyes will also observe that holy shit Dan Aykroyd's father wrote a book about being an actual ghost buster.

#1. Akira Kurosawa's Entire Filmography

filmreference"I don't know what the fuck these 'actors' are, I just want them off my set."

Toward this end, in his movie Red Beard, Kurosawa had the hospital set fully stocked with medical supplies -- even the drawers and cupboards, which, despite never being opened on camera or even mentioned by the characters, were nonetheless expensively, thoroughly, authentically stocked with pills. Kurosawa once dyed an entire town's water supply black just so the rain would look better on camera. If you were featured in one of Kurosawa's movies, you could expect to shoot inside the real, period-appropriate houses he'd have built, wear the real, period-appropriate clothing (that you were expected to live in even while not actively filming) and memorize the complete dossier on your character's back story, even if you only had a couple of lines. Oh, and you should also be prepared to get shot at with real arrows.

"Of course he's dead. I'm a director, not a goddamn liar."

That part went without saying, right? It sure did to Toshiro Mifune, who, in the final scene of Throne of Blood, was shot at by real arrows that landed inches away from him.

It's like nobody told Kurosawa that movies were just pretend, and so he was attempting to travel through time via sheer earnestness.

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